Luna Peak

Luna Peak (8,311ft)

Eric Gilbertson

October 20, 2018: 12:30am-4:59pm

New fastest known time: 16 hours 29 minutes car to car (according to fastestknowntime.com)

48 miles, 12,200ft gain

Luna peak is known as a top contender for having one of the best views in Washington state. It is also, according mountaineer Sean O’Rourke, possibly one of the toughest dayhikes in the lower 48 states. The standard way to climb Luna peak is a 48-mile roundtrip hike, which involves 34 miles of on-trail travel plus 5 miles of bushwhacking, 9 miles of scree, talus and heather, and a 500ft 4^th class scramble along an exposed ridge. The bushwhack is notoriously difficult, and the stream crossing to access the bushwhack has itself turned parties around.

Most parties climb Luna as an overnight trip, but over the past few summers very fit parties have started climbing Luna Peak as long car-to-car daytrips. As far as I researched, the fastest known time was held by Sean O’Rourke (aka Dr. Dirtbag) of 18 hours 50 minutes. Sean has most of the fastest known times for mountains in the pacific northwest, so I figured this would be a lower bound for the time required to climb Luna.

I had recently finished climbing the Bulgers, and figured I might as well climb the extra seven mountains that would be on a stricter definition of the Washington top 100. Luna is one of those seven mountains. I was available for one day over the weekend, so I thought I’d try to squeeze Luna peak into that one day. Amazingly it hadn’t snowed for the past 10 days, and most of the upper route on Luna Peak is on south facing aspects. This meant I had a good chance of getting a snow-free ascent of Luna, which is pretty surprising for late October.

My time constraint was that I needed to be back in Seattle at a reasonable hour Saturday night to get ready for a hiking/packrafting trip Sunday to Blanca Lake. I estimated based on my previous long day trips that I would average about 2.5 miles per hour, which would put the trip around 20 hours. So I would have to start very early to get back at a reasonable hour Saturday night.

I left work at 3pm Friday afternoon and made it to the Ross Dam trailhead by 7pm. After eating some pasta I curled

up in the back of the car and was asleep by 7:30pm. Somehow I have an ability to fall asleep almost whenever I want to, which is pretty useful on trips like this. It helps, of course, that the sun sets around 6:15pm now, so it was very dark out by the time I went to sleep.

My alarm woke me up at midnight and I officially left the car at 12:30am. I decided to gamble that almost all the snow on the upper mountain that had fallen over the past month had melted out, so instead of crampons and ice axe I just brought microspikes and hiking poles. This was mostly just in case the summit ridge was icy. I wore trail runners and carried some warm clothing, but otherwise tried to go light.

The start of the trail was a one-mile descent to Ross Dam, then the trail crosses the dam and ascends the slope on the other side. The next six miles are mostly flat all the way to the Big Beaver Creek bridge. The trail was very runnable, but I decided just to hike swiftly and avoid stumbling on rocks in the dark. The Big Beaver Creek bridge is very close to Ross Lake, and some parties take a water taxi to this location. The Ross Lake Resort operates a water taxi between 8am-5pm that will drop you off and pick you up, shaving about 14 miles off the trip. Unfortunately this time window wasn’t really compatible with my schedule, so I just decided to hike all those extra miles.

I started feeling kind of miserable after several hours of hiking through the dark at 3:30am after very little sleep, but after eating a snickers bar I cheered up and had energy again. I eventually passed Luna Camp and soon reached the point where there was supposedly a log jam crossing of Big Beaver Creek. I’d read that this crossing is one of the trickiest parts of the whole trip. The creek can be too deep to ford at times, and parties have to get lucky to find fallen logs to cross. Some parties give up and don’t find a way across. Luckily I had a GPS track of a good crossing provided by Jake Robinson from his friend Brad who’d climbed Luna back in June.

It was 6am when I officially left the trail, and I’d kind of hoped the sun would have risen by the time I needed to start bushwhacking. But I still had 1.5 hours of dark, so plunged into the woods anyways. I soon located the logjam, and it was covered in ice. I carefully crawled across on all fours and made it safely to the other side. The creek, though, wasn’t actually very deep at all. It looked like it would have been trivial to wade across. I guess by this time in the fall the upper snowfields that usually melt to feed the stream aren’t melting much in the cold weather. So the stream isn’t as high. I kept this in mind for the return.

I had crossed Big Beaver Creek about a half mile downstream from Access Creek, which was the bushwhacking route.

I bushwhacked up through dense brush to Access Creek, and then started ascending the south side of Access Creek. After ascending a few hundred vertical feet I noticed the north side looked more open, so I crossed over. By now it was 7:30am and it was finally light enough for me to turn off my headlamp. I had certainly lost time bushwhacking in the dark, since it’s kind of hard to find the best line through woods you can’t really see. However, I was pretty excited to see that all the devil’s club leaves had fallen off for the season, making the bushwhack a bit less painful.

Once on the north side of Access Creek I picked up an intermittent climbers trail. The climbers trail would disappear when the forest opened up, but this was no problem because the bushwhacking was through open forest in these areas anyways. Overall the bushwhacking on the north side of Access Creek is some of the tamest I’ve encountered compared to other Bulger peaks. It’s mostly open forest, with occasional blueberry bushes to push through. I did not need to pass through any slide alder or vine maple.

After the bottom two thirds of the bushwhack the climbers trail becomes continuous for the rest of the bushwhack. The climbers trail leads to a creek crossing around 3,700ft at the base of the eastern cirque of Luna Peak. I crossed the creek into a talus field and was treated to my first view of Luna. The talus was covered in ice, so was a bit sketchy, but I scrambled up paralleling the creek until I was above the highest grove of slide alder.

At the base of the cirque, past a few bivy sites, I turned left and hiked up a gully leading directly to the ridgeline. The bottom half of the gully was talus and scree, but the upper half had a climbers trail of steps carved out of the grassy slope. The muddy grass was frozen and firm, allowing me to make quick progress.

At the crest of the ridge at 5,800ft I got my first views of the southern Pickets, and started to understand why people consider this area to be some of the best views in Washington. The pickets are an extremely jagged ridge of technical peaks with big glaciers at the bottom. I think they’re named after a picket fence. I was looking at the north faces, which were covered in snow that will probably stay until next spring.

From the pass I turned right and traversed across pleasant but steep heather slopes. This traverse would be quite slippery with a fresh dusting of snow, but luckily all the snow had melted. I had gambled correctly by not bringing the crampons and ice ax. I filled up my Nalgene at a small stream below a snowfield. Somehow I’d only drank one liter of water so far, perhaps because I was mostly moving in the cold and dark and not sweating much.

After crossing the heather I scrambled up some talus and class 2/3 terrain to reach Luna Col. This would be an amazing place to camp because there are views of the both the northern and southern pickets from the col. If I go back I’ll definitely bring overnight gear and camp there.

I took a short break at the col to eat some cookies and ditch some extra gear like food and my mini-puffy jacket. The summit was close and I figured I wouldn’t need any extra weight on the 4^th class scramble. I soon started hiking up the southwest ridge of Luna up class 2/3 terrain all the way to the false summit. The false summit was covered in snow, and was in fact the first unavoidable snow I encountered on the ascent. It still wasn’t enough to justify putting on the microspikes, though.

I ditched my hiking poles at the false summit and started the scramble over to the true summit. The ridge was intermittently covered with snow, but I was able to mostly avoid it by carefully choosing my foot and hand placements. I first dropped about 5ft from the false summit, then scrambled across the narrow and exposed 4^th class ridge. To my left a snow-covered cliff dropped several hundred feet steeply onto the northwest face, and to my right a slightly less-exposed but snow-free cliff dropped down the southeast face. Near the summit I dropped down to a ledge to my right, scrambled back to the ridge behind the summit, then climbed up a few 4^th class moves to gain the summit from the back side.

I found the small summit register and signed in. I was the first one up since September 3^rd, and I figured I might be the last one up until spring time. I flipped through the book and noticed that Sean O’Rourke had signed in a few years earlier and said his time from car to summit was 9 hours 40 minutes. I looked at my watch, and it had taken me 9 hours and 45 minutes. I was pretty surprised that I basically tied Sean’s time. I hadn’t run at all on the trail section, and had just gone at my normal pace on the bushwhack and scramble.

This made me think that maybe if I hustled on the way back I could beat my 20 hour time estimate and get back to

Seattle at a more reasonable hour. After admiring the view a bit longer I scrambled back to the false summit, then hiked down to the col.

I packed up the gear I’d stashed, then scrambled back down to the heather slopes. I stopped briefly to fill up another Nalgene from the snow melt, then traversed around to the southeast ridge of Luna. The descent down the scree gully was much faster, and this time most of the ice had melted off the boulders in the talus field, so I didn’t have to be quite as careful.

I hit the climbers trail back on the north side of Access Creek, and it was actually good enough that I could jog it for short sections. This speaks a lot about how tame the bushwhack on Access Creek is if it is actually joggable. (Granted, I may have just picked a really good route to follow and other routes could still be bad).

This time I stayed on the north side of Access Creek all the way down to the confluence with Big Beaver Creek. The woods stayed open and the bushwhacking tame the whole way down. At the confluence I walked across icy rocks until there was only a 10ft wide gap in the creek, which was only shin deep. I was astounded how much easier this crossing was than had been reported from groups earlier in the summer. I quickly waded across and made a short bushwhack back to the trail.

I reached the trail at 1pm, and at that point knew I had a good shot of getting back ahead of schedule. Even if I took exactly the same amount of time to hike back as it had taken hiking up, I would get back at 6:30pm for an 18 hour round trip. But I was feeling pretty strong, so decided to run the trail and make up even more time.

I ended up jogging all the sections of trail that were flat or downhill and walking the short uphill bits. It kind of felt

like the uphill bits were my rest sections since I wasn’t running those ones. My backpack was pretty bulky with all the warm clothing and extra food, and I kind of wished I had one of those water vests I see the ultra-runners wear. But I needed all the extra capacity for the fall-season ascent, so didn’t complain.

On the jog back I encountered one other hiker near 39-mile camp, and one fisherman near Ross Lake. I crossed the bridge over Big Beaver Creek and was surprised how much deeper it was down there, now that I could see it in the daylight. It was definitely deep enough that you would need to swim to cross it, if not for the bridge.

I maintained my pace for the next six miles, reaching Ross Dam at 4:45pm. For some reason I’d set my mental goal to reach the car by 5pm, and it was now crunch time. The last mile was uphill, but I knew I could push it at the end, since I’d be resting once I reached the car anyways. I managed to jog about half of the uphill, reaching the car about 20 seconds before my watch hit 5pm. I snapped a quick picture of my watch at the trailhead, then finally rested at the car.

My official car-to-car time was 16 hours 29 minutes. Somehow I’d shaved almost 2.5 hours off the previous fastest known time for Luna. More important, though, I didn’t have to bushwhack or hike back in the dark, which wouldn’t have been super fun. It also appeared that I would make it back home for dinner, and have time to pack up for my packrafting trip to Blanca Lake the next morning.

I dumped my gear in the car, scarfed down a half pound of pasta I’d packed for this occasion, then started the drive back home. After eating dinner in Seattle later that evening I noticed that I had 95,000 steps on my fitbit. It’s not often that I get that close to the 100,000 – step threshold, and the novelty of seeing the fitbit try and fail to display that extra digit still hasn’t worn off. So, with some reluctance, after dinner I put my shoes back on and walked around the neighborhood for another 2.5 miles until the fitbit registered an even 100,000 steps for the day.

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